Forget wires and bulky machines—with advanced healthcare technologies, your watch can track your heartrate during your workout. Soon, thinner, lighter and more flexible wearable devices may be on the way thanks to a class of electronics called flexible interactive displays, or FIDs. Unlike conventional displays, FIDs can be bent or curved without losing functionality, offering unprecedented possibilities from soft robots to rollable screens.
The team led by Xiaoying Qi, a Scientist from A*STAR’s Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), and Kanyi Pu, from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore has been developing FIDs for healthcare applications. They created the Biomolecule-Interactive Flexible Light Emitting Capacitor Display (BIO-LEC), a device which ‘reads’ biomolecules in a dynamic way and displays the information on a glowing screen.
“Our BIO-LEC is designed to provide a local, dynamic, quantitative, and instantaneous visualisation of biomolecules through a naked-eye detectable electroluminescent emission,” Qi explained.
The BIO-LEC is made up of two parts: a light source, and a sampling compartment made up of a microfluidic chip. The display is designed to accurately measure biomolecules in real-time without any special labelling or preparation.
Qi said other development considerations were that the BIO-LEC should be easy and cost-effective to manufacture at large scales and should be sensitive enough to pick up even trace concentrations of a target biomolecule.
In their study, the group successfully demonstrated BIO-LEC to accurately track heparin concentrations in a series of test simulations. Heparin is a drug commonly used to treat and prevent blood clots.
“Over 500 million doses are prescribed worldwide each year,” said Qi. “Heparin needs to be administered within a certain therapeutic window and is the second most common medication error in intensive care units.” The team’s success demonstrates BIO-LEC’s potential utility in real-time monitoring and measurement of medication levels in patients.
Moreover, BIO-LEC is relatively easy to manufacture and more flexible compared to conventional FIDs. Instead of mounting rigid electronic components onto printed circuits of flexible substrates, BIO-LEC uses a different production process.
“BIO-LEC manufacturing is based on the principle of inorganic phosphor powder-based LEC display with add-on top microfluidic sampling function, which possesses the simplest printable multi-layering device feature,” said Qi.
Qi elaborated that the group is motivated to expand the targets detectable by their BIO-LEC by tweaking the dielectric properties of the device’s top electrode. They are also experimenting with various assembly features for the BIO-LEC in up to three dimensions. “All these parameters are interesting and are worth exploring,” Qi added.
The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this research are from the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech).
